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In 2010 the Pentaho EMEA channel revenue grew by 285%, the number of EMEA partners doubled and we held 114 events with EMEA Partners. Wow! You may be asking yourself, ‘How is it possible to experience such growth and find time to hold 100+ events?’ Two answers: first , this growth is a result of our hard working EMEA partners creating success with their impressive customers such as: BNOVA (Infocamere, Coopservice ); PortaBI (Telefonica, Banco Santandar), Conduct ( Aspiro Music , TV2 ), Millersoft (Air Menzies, Regenesis, Badoo), Linalis ( Swissport ). The second reason for success is the backbone of the EMEA Channels team, Pentaho EMEA Channels account manager, Sharmila Wijeyakumar (known to her friends as Sam). Pentaho is very proud to announce that Sharmila was named one of the Top Women of the Channel by Everything Channel’s CRN Magazine. Reading her section below from the award, you can easily understand why she received this award. The Top Women of the Channel is an annual list recognizing female executives for their accomplishments over the past year, based on their achievements as executives and the amount of influence they wield...

Pentaho is used by many casual business users including physicians , real estate agents , store managers , resort managers , insurance agents and airport staff . Today, Pentaho is proud to add dairy farmers to the list of casual business users with the publication of a customer success story about 3A Latte Arborea, the leading dairy and milk producer in Sardinia, Italy. Read the full case study to learn how Pentaho along with jAPS Entando and J-service have provided power to the dairy farmers to help them moo-ve ahead (we just had too). 3A Latte Arborea is an interesting story about how Pentaho BI has helped the farmers to make more profitable decisions about production costs, optimize operational efficiency, identify strengths and weaknesses in the supply chain and improve overall short and long-term planning. Check it out in English and Italian . If you have an interesting story about how working with Pentaho is improving your business, we want to help you highlight your great work. There are many opportunities both public and private that are available. If you are interested, please contact u s here . photo credit: iStock Photo

Pentaho is very fortunate to have such a fantastic community. There are a few community rockstars that find time in their uber busy lives to write books about using Pentaho. The latest book published, the Pentaho Data Integration 4 Cookbook by co-authors Adrián Pulvirenti & Maria Carina Roldán is making its way to the top of the Amazon bestseller tech list. Even more impressive – this is Maria’s second book about PDI in just 15 months! (In April 2010 she published PDI 3.2: Beginner’s Guide ). We were interested to learn more about the book and the authors. Check out our interview below to get the inside scoop about the PDI 4 Cookbook. Read below to learn how to win a FREE copy of the PDI 4 Cookbook and for a special discount offer from Packt Publishing 1) What inspired you to write the PDI 4 cookbook so soon after "PDI 3.2 for beginners"? Maria : At the time PDI 3.2 for Beginners was published there was a clear need for a book that revealed the secrets of Kettle, in particular for those who barely knew about this tool. The...

Social Networking Data R ecently, I have been asked about Pentaho's product interaction with social network providers such as Twitter and Facebook. The data stored within these " social graphs " can provide its owners with critical metrics around their content. By analyzing trends within user growth and demographics as well as consumption and creation of content...owners and developers are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook and Twitter. Social networking data can already be viewed and analyzed utilizing existing tools such as FB Insights or even purchasable 3rd party software packages created specifically for this purpose. Now...Pentaho Data Integration in its traditional sense is an ETL ( Extract Transform Load ) tool. It can be used to extract and extrapolate data from these services and merge or consolidate it with other relative company data. However, it can also be used to automatically push information about a company's product or service to the social network platforms. You see this in action today if you have ever used Facebook and " Liked " something a company had to offer. At regular intervals, you will sometimes note unsolicited product offers and...

Q&A is a series on the Business Intelligence from the Swamp Blog that interviews key members of the Pentaho team to learn more about their focus at Pentaho and outlook on the Business Intelligence industry. Our Q&A today is with Jonathan Seper, a Customer Success Manager at Pentaho. When he’s not on the phone making sure Pentaho customers are happy and on-track with their deployment, you can find the Vancouver native fly fishing in and around Central Florida! To learn more about Jonathan’s role at Pentaho and view on Business Intelligence we asked him five questions: 1. What is your role at Pentaho? I am a Customer Success Manager. A successful Business Intelligence deployment requires not only a full product, but also investment of your people’s time and effort. Our team is comprised of seasoned Pentaho veterans to help our customers get the most out of Pentaho software and extensive services. 2. Why was it important for Pentaho to introduce the Customer Success team? As a commercial open source subscription model, we rely on superior support to ensure our customers renew each year, i.e. we must make sure our customers...

Yesterday Reuters reported on a recent survey which revealed that “retailers have cash on their balance sheets and nearly half of 100 top retail executives said they are planning to spend it on technology.” Specifically, retailers are looking to spend that money on analytical tools to “improve company growth, expansion and planning.” There is a tremendous opportunity for retailers to use analytical tools to make smarter business decisions with the enormous amount of data captured from online purchases and the cash register. Tomorrow Pentaho customer Sheetz , a multibillion convenience store retailer, will share their experience implementing Pentaho Business Intelligence on a webcast. Sheetz has gained visibility into purchasing behavior, store performance metrics and cross-channel trends using Pentaho. Join us tomorrow, July 14, to learn about Convenient Self-Service BI. Register here: www.pentaho.com/events/20110714-bi-4-retail-webcast/

The rules of the game have changed for enterprise software. In Aaron Levie’s recent article on TechCruch, “ Building An Enterprise Software Company That Doesn’t Suck ”, he breaks down the changes in enterprise software business into three categories. Levie details how differently enterprise software is developed, sold, and supported today versus just a few years ago. I found Levie’s perspective interesting – especially because it matches the model that we have followed at Pentaho to achieve great success. 1. How enterprise software is developed today. It’s no longer about products that are feature-bloated merely to get into RFP wars and win multi-year, large contracts. Those days are over – all they produced were complex technologies that had no real usage. Now what drives demand is the real business application of software. Success is in user adoption, not in feature checklists. This is exactly why an open source business model has been successful for enterprise software. The products are developed because there was a real business need for them. Many features are implemented and submitted by the community members, because real users need these capabilities in their business applications. This...

Recently I had the pleasure to speak with Albert Pang, a veteran of the application market space with more than 25 years of experience and the founder of Apps Run The World . In our conversation, centered on Pentaho BI 4 , we discussed the use of business intelligence by the casual business user – something that in the past has been impossible due to the highly technical nature of business intelligence deployments. In his recent blog, Business Analytics for the Masses , Pang depicts this problem and describes how it has impacted the SMB market. He explains how highly technical BI tools worked as a roadblock for SMB companies that did not have intensive IT resources to allocate to BI projects -- something that independent BI vendors in the market (Pentaho, Tableau, and Qliktech) have realized and leveraged as an opportunity to improve the BI market. Pang goes further by saying “Pentaho, which has made its name in the open-source BI marketplace, introduced Pentaho BI 4 Enterprise Edition in June. One of the key targets is non-technical business users who can use the new product to create highly formatted,...

To promote the launch of Pentaho BI 4 last week, we hosted two live demos to showcase the great new features bringing ‘ Power to the User ’ in our latest release. By the volume of questions we received during the demos (which had record attendance) – we can tell that everyone is just as excited about this release as we are! Although it was impossible to answer every question during the live demo, there was a trend of common questions asked by the audience. Here are the top five most asked questions and answers: Q: Which Internet browsers does Pentaho support? Is there a preferred browser? A: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome are all supported by Pentaho. We do not have a preferred browser – any of these are fine. Q: Does Pentaho offer training or classes? A: Yes, Pentaho and our partners offer a wide range of online and in-person training classes all over the world. Visit our training page or contact your account rep to learn more. Also, we plan to host a live demo of BI 4 for more technical users within the next month...